Peter Gabriel ”Up”
Peter Gabriel tapes in the shop!
“Up” had been 10 years in the making. The first sound on the opening track “Darkness” is the tiniest little drum beat padded out on a thimble. Then, like a lion pouncing, a sonic howl shoots you back from the cage. I have no idea how one makes this terrifying sound. I guess that’s what took ten years. “Darkness” is the inverse of the opening track “Intruder” from the album where Gabriel’s face is melting on the cover. “Intruder” starts with the cold smack of a drum beat and then the tinkle-creak of a musicbox I assume is made of dirt, nails and teeth. Gabriel is varying and developing, but he is also going in circles. “Darkness” keeps lurching into a down-tempo section that sings from the soft inner-child side of Gabriel, the side that squeezed into the boom box held over Llyod Dobler’s head singing “In Your Eyes” to Ione Skye. This is an artist very aware that one part of himself is locked within the other. “Up” is a head cage album, an artistic representation of its own problem.
Gabriel was never known for his balance. Each of his first four untitled solo album covers featured a distortion of his face to let you know this was going to be a little intense, but if you watched closely, he started opening up more, first empathizing with political dissidents like Stephen Biko, enemies of the state that lived out a real life version of his head cage. Then he started empathizing with even regular people. This softening of emotional palette culminated in his commercial breakthrough “So” which surprised everyone with a simple black and white photo of Peter Gabriel’s face that wasn’t on fire or distorted or covered in boils. He was (gasp) handsome. He also wrote more directly, about love and relationships. Gabriel had come a long way from his first solo album where he thought a song called “Moribund the Burgermeister” was a good idea. After the mega-hit of “So”, he started taking a long time between projects, collecting hot new didgeridoo virtuosos on his world music label, contributing movie soundtrack mood music he could program from a Moog in his sleep, and getting mired in co-directing an ambitious multimedia Cirque du Soleil style show celebrating the millennium called “Ovo” to be held in the newly constructed London Millennium Dome. He complained the management did not understand the artistic statement being made. Hearing the opening rap about trees, I would side with the management. He kept busy, but dodged that new solo album.
“Up” is an aspirational title. It is decidedly “down”, a dark, dense, labored album. He’s 52 and working through some things. Those things sound mostly like depression, but with marimbas. “I Grieve” is as listless as you imagine, but does eventually pick up into some beauty. A lot of these songs are like that: brooding mood, almost collapsing , then rising up with an uplifting coda at the last second to pull you out of despondency. If you give yourself to this album you are inside his head and it is not a peaceful easy feeling. One of the tracks is called “My Head Sounds Like That” and there lies the problem. He’s not feeling well in there and it sets his despair tolerance out of whack. “My Head Sounds Like That” is another song lurching between soft inner heart-Peter and clanking, grinding head-Peter. As computers became part of music production he would work tracks over with hundreds of versions and obsessively process and experiment with sound. There’s a noise in “I Grieve” that might be a hushed robot elephant. Technology was a creative tool and an enabler of an obsessive, head-based approach to music. It would be shocking to see him sitting with a guitar by a campfire and just playing a song in 4/4 time. There are stimulating new rhythms and constructions here, but it is not surprising he has made no new album of material since. His process seemed to be eating him alive.
There is a small group of “up” songs that form a sub-genre within Gabriel’s work. The biggest of them was the smash “Sledgehammer” which took over MTV in 1986 and played its inventive stop motion video continuously. “Sledgehammer’ is at its bones, a soul/R&B redo. Sam & Dave with new noises. It sounds like arty Huey Lewis to me. The next album “Us” tried to repeat the pattern with “Steam” another brass section fueled, soul workout that didn’t fare as well. Then there’s “The Barry Williams Show” the newest attempt to change tempo featured on “Up”. It’s actually my favorite of the three, but it’s a low bar. “The Barry Williams Show” finds Gabriel pastiching funk-jazz inspirations while he sings about the cavalcade of trash passing by on a fictional Jerry Springer type talk show. At the very least, it’s not asking you to dance. You’re allowed to sit quietly and appreciate, at most, sway. It’s an improvement for “up” Gabriel, since dancing to this world music cataloguer can microagress seven continents of cultures if you pop out the wrong moves. “The Barry Williams Show”, where he’s a little out of his element, reveals him to be a collector of styles, knitting them together in the studio, but having trouble becoming the sum of the parts.
Gabriel always suffered from head/heart issues. One of his most moving melodies form his time in the prog rock band of Genesis was “The Carpetcrawlers” who “heed their callers" and advise “you’ve got to get in to get out”. It’s a song that refuses to reveal what it is about, despite becoming a stadium sing-a-long. “Signal to Noise” on “Up” is not as impenetrable as Genesis era Gabriel, but it does use a sound engineering term as a metaphor to sing about the despair of a lost cause. Not exactly “Be My Baby”. “Signal to Noise”, a coiled, tight composition has some undeniable power, namely an impressive vocal release by Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, that soars and screams out against the caged strings and ritual sacrifice percussion. But if signal is hope and noise is despair, guess who wins?. “Up” is an attempt to resolve the incompatibility of hope/despair, head/heart, spirit/intellect mind/body, inner/outer, melody/lyric, but the album is an expression of the stalemate rather than liberation from that struggle. That takes a very particular type of listener to be interested. Successful at broadening his palette from his youthful pretensions, Gabriel ultimately remains caught in his own head, making recordings of the banging inside his skull.